O2 and Ericsson Deal to Continue 5G Rollout Across the UK

Mobile operator O2 UK and telecoms technology giant Ericsson have today agreed to expand their existing relationship by deploying the firm’s latest 5G Radio Access Network (RAN) hardware, software and service upgrades across the “West” of the United Kingdom. The work will include upgrades for existing 2G, 3G and 4G sites.

O2 officially began their deployment of ultrafast 5G based mobile broadband technology in October 2019, which took place across some of the UK’s busiest cities and this has since been expanded (here). Sadly they’re currently limited to only using a single 40MHz slice of the 3.4GHz band, makes it difficult to deliver on the much hyped gigabit speeds, but further radio spectrum bands are due to be auctioned off by Ofcom later in 2020.

Ericsson have been one of O2’s key suppliers for this initial 5G deployment, not least via their Cloud Packet Core network and Cloud Unified Data Management and Policy, as well as radio systems including Baseband 6630, Radio 8823 and AIR 6488.

Naturally it won’t come as much of a surprise, particularly given the Government’s currently unstable position toward Huawei, to find that O2 are now doubling down on their partnership with Ericsson and have today extended their relationship to include deployments across more of the United Kingdom.

Brendan O’Reilly, CTO of O2, said:

“We are pleased to be moving forward with Ericsson as one of our primary vendors for our 5G rollout. Telecommunications has never been more important in keeping the country connected, and we look forward to bringing the enhanced capabilities of 5G to our customers.”

Arun Bansal, Ericsson’s President of Europe, said:

“5G will be crucial for the UK’s economic recovery and underpin its digital future. We are committed to ensuring that the UK achieves its gigabit connectivity targets so that enterprises and society at large benefit from high quality connectivity. We are delighted to be continuing our long-term partnership with O2 with this 5G network evolution.

We are proud to expand our world-class 5G coverage, leading the modernization of UK networks as a reliable partner for years to come. Together with all of our customers, we are focused on delivering more capacity and connectivity, especially as networks are more critical than ever.”

An innovation cluster will also be developed as a collaboration platform to evaluate and test future mobile architecture, technology and systems as O2 builds further towards the potential for network migration to 5G Standalone (SA) architecture.